Discussion “empathy is what makes us human”

[sannoji]

i hate that saying so so much. weirdly, i have so much history with it and it's part of what made me start feeling so inhuman. i don't have any affective empathy really and cognitive is really quite a lot of effort for me, to a degree that others don't seem to have. so more than anything, that makes me feel really divorced from the human race. i would always kind of just stand there doing nothing if my family got upset and my parents would always go "you've got no empathy, you evil thing. you don't even care."

i also despise it as a marker of whether or not someone is a 'good' person. i've known several other people who also struggle with empathy who have been perfectly nice. shouldn't it make them 'better' people anyway, when you're putting in active effort to care about others? but noooo, if it isn't instinctive to you then you're just. not human apparently. personally, i don't think there's any personality trait that you'd have to have to be an 'actual human.' all of them end up excluding someone.

tangentially related, i learned about altruism in class a while back and they were talking about egoistic helping which is just to alleviate your own suffering because of someone else's suffering, and when you do proper altruistic helping it's solely because of wanting to alleviate the other person's suffering. i kind of laughed because i guess i always only do the first one. makes me wonder if i'm an awful sort of person sometimes, but other times i conclude it's just the rest of the world that's wrong.

 

[Namelesa]

Personally the statement "empathy is what makes us human" is bullpoop. A lot of people wouldn't even try to be empathetic and see how you see the world if your experience of life is different and try to invalidate your feelings. What makes us human is we have quite a high amount of intelligence compared to other animals but we use it do even stupider things than what any other animal could do.

 

[avoid_slow_death]

Tbf, most people practice "selective empathy". In other words, they choose to empathize towards people they feel that share a perceived commonality with them. Anything outside of that though they tend to dehumanize and show zero empathy towards. So no, it doesn't make you more or less human. Biology determines that.

 

[EvisceratedJester]

People seem to act as though being empathetic = being a good person, which is far from the truth. Those who are empathetic can also be manipulative. It also ends up being ableist since those with conditions, such as autism and ASPD, may have issues when it comes to their ability to empathize with others. We also discussed egotistic helping in my social psych class. The professor made a point about how empathy and compassion, despite being commonly conflated with each other, are two different things, with compassion being based more on "other-focused". Compassion generally involves feelings of benevolence and goodwill towards others, compared to empathy, which is motivated more so by alleviating your own distress.

I also find that it's interesting how people think that more empathy will automatically lead to a better world, despite the fact that our feelings of empathy towards others can be limited to only certain groups of people. People will feel empathetic towards those who they view as perfect victims, for example, but will turn a cold shoulder towards victims who act out. Another fantastic example of this is when it comes to ideas surrounding prison reform and rehabilitation. People will empathize and will advocate for these things only when it comes to criminals guilty of certain crimes but not others. They might be fine with it when it comes to murderers but not when it comes to rapists. Empathy is conditional, thus it can't be relied on alone when it comes to "being a good person" (which, tbh, I don't even believe in the idea of "good vs bad people". I think it's just regressive black-and-white nonsense).

Statements like "empathy makes us human" don't even make sense since empathy isn't even human-specific. Other animal species are also capable of feeling empathy too. This goes back into the stupid human-centric rhetoric wherein people assume that most traits that humans possess are unique to our species or that they are a sign that we aren't even animals. I understand that, whether conscious of it or not, most of us likely have a bias in favour of our own species, but at the same time I feel like we need to learn to shut up and just accept the fact that humans aren't really above other animal species. A lot of our horrible traits aren't human-specific, nor are most of our good and neutral traits.

It's all just dumb bullshit so you may as well just ignore it rather than letting it get to you.

 

[FinalVoid25]

If empathy is what makes a human, at least 90 % of people I know wouldn't be humans according to this definition. I barely met anyone in my life that showed me empathy.

 

[ijustwishtodie]

Most humans don't even have empathy aside from when their loved ones are suffering and even then their empathy for their loved ones is conditional as you have cases where parents won't be empathetic if their child is suicidal or LGBT or something else that they disagree with. I an honestly amazed at how this species has managed to delude itself into thinking that it has empathy for each other

 

[CTB Dream]

Tbf, most people practice "selective empathy". In other words, they choose to empathize towards people they feel that share a perceived commonality with them. Anything outside of that though they tend to dehumanize and show zero empathy towards. So no, it doesn't make you more or less human. Biology determines that.

ya this exct me injury damage nobod empth all make dehmn